A new software package will be released on Friday that allows parents to secretly monitor their kids' Internet usage. While products have been used to clock netsurfing at the office for a couple of years, some people question whether or not covert supervision is a healthy way of keeping an eye on where kids are going online.
The product, called Prudence, tracks all online destinations visited by youthful netsurfers, recording URLs, bookmarks, cache activity, graphics and cookies at intervals determined by the user. Prudence can be configured to simply log the information for parental perusal, or to download and encrypt all graphics, storing them in a hidden file on the user's hard drive for later scrutiny.
For the concerned parent who doesn't want to wait until the end of the work day to discover that little Ashley or Leo has been dropping into erotic.com, Aryan Nation, or gay.net, Prudence will email logs to a parent at the office, issuing an update every few minutes.
Many of Internet monitoring and blocking packages already available are used primarily by systems administrators in the workplace -- such as WebSense and LittleBrother -- but Prudence is the first pitched specifically to the "parental responsibility market segment," says John Barrows, president of Blue Wolf Network, creators of the software. While corporate monitoring products typically cost hundreds of dollars, Prudence will be available from sites like buydirect.com for US$39.95.
"If a kid knows a parent is monitoring him or her," Barrows says, "they'll be less prone to going where they shouldn't."
(Prudence runs invisibly in the background, and it's left to the parents' discretion to alert their kids to the fact that they're being monitored.)
Calling blocking and filtering software like Net Nanny "practically an enticement to beat it and view porn," Barrows stresses that Prudence is not a censorship tool.
"We don't believe in censorship in this country, but we believe parents have a right to be involved in their childrens' lives," he says. "Purely from a philosophical point of view, anything that doesn't censor is better."
Barrows sees parents of 8- to 12-year-olds as the core market for Prudence, though he also says that it's "certainly a tool that could be used by businesses" to keep tabs on employee surfing habits.
He admits that Prudence could also find a market among jealous spouses or anyone else who wants to train a hidden eye on someone else's browsing patterns: "Prudence doesn't know how old you are or what role you're playing in the family ... but I'm directing this at parents who want to be responsible parents."
In a press release, Blue Wolf CFO Nancy Barrows calls Prudence (with "tongue slightly in cheek") "every nosy mother's dream."
Prudence also enables parents to shield their children from sites that they themselves like to visit. By giving parents tools to purge their browser histories and encrypt graphics in password-protected files, Prudence allows parents to view sites they consider inappropriate for children without fear that their kids will pull up XXX GIFs from the cache the next day.
"On a grander scale of things," John Barrows explains, "I hope that Prudence awakens in parents some of the responsibility that's been abdicated in the last couple of decades."
As the latest in a series of Blue Wolf products with human names, Barrows refers to Prudence as "she." When the product is released, it will be represented by a cartoon of a "young working mother with short red hair and a no-nonsense attitude," Barrows says.
Barrows conceived of the idea for Prudence while reading about the legal battle in Virginia over the installation of content-filtering software on computers in public libraries in Loudoun County.
"That was an impasse. Prudence creates a dialog as opposed to creating an impasse," Barrows declares, claiming that parents armed with logs of visits to inappropriate sites would be better equipped to open a discussion with their kids about Net use.
Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, questioned whether "believing in surveillance" is better than believing in censorship.
"You could go drop a videocamera in the kids' bedroom to find out what's really going on in there, but would you want to get to that point?" Rotenberg says.
Rotenberg cautioned parents against looking for "software solutions" to the complex task of inculcating kids with a sense of what is appropriate surfing territory for them.
"Some of these products are being driven by hype and fear that parents have about their kids using the Net," Rotenberg observes. "Good parenting is having some faith that our children are being brought up to make the right decisions."
Covertly installing "surveillance-ware" like Prudence "is not a way to build trust with your children," says Rotenberg.
Jean Armour Polly, author of The Internet Kids and Family Yellow Pages and spokesperson for a filtering product called Guardian Net, thinks "there's certainly room in the marketplace" for a product like Prudence.
"I would like to know if my son is getting into safersex.org," she says. "I would see it as an opportunity for a conversation." Polly believes, however, that use of monitoring software should be disclosed by parents.
When asked if Prudence could result in traumatic "outings" of gay kids growing up in conservative households, Barrows replied that a child concealing his identity from homophobic parents is "an unhealthy situation. I don't see any way [of] controlling a parent who's going to be pernicious."
Scott Lumish, sales director for the Kansmen Corporation, the makers of LittleBrother, says that while his company's products are used by IBM, Kodak, the Navy, and the National Security Agency to compile detailed records of Net usage by employees, he "could only imagine the Friday night dinner conversations" that might ensue from the use of monitoring software at home.
"If I needed to know stuff, I hate to think that I'd have to invade my kids' privacy to get it," says Lumish, who is the father of a six-year-old girl.
Barrows, who says he was brought up in a "fairly strict household where we were monitored a lot," admits that he "had a huge amount of guilt" when he was a kid about reading things that his parents would have disapproved of, such as Playboy.
When asked how he might have felt if there had been some covert way of supervising his reading as a child, Barrows says that the discovery that he was thumbing through Lolita could have opened up "a dialog" with his parents.
"A lot of this stuff wasn't available to you when I was a kid," he insists. "Adult content just wasn't available to kids. Now it's pervasive."
